A Public Land Mobile Network (PLMN) is a network established and operated by governments and approved operators for providing the public with land mobile communication business. The PLMN is generally interconnected with a public switched telephone network to form a communication network of the whole region or country.
Generally, the identity (“ID” for short) of the PLMN is a string of numbers, for example, the network ID of the PLMN of China Mobile is 46000, and the network ID of the PLMN of China Unicom is 46001. Users can communicate with each other conveniently and quickly via mobile networks provided by various operators. With an improvement of people's living standard, there are more and more users carrying communication terminal equipment. When a user arrives at a visited place that is not the home of a card of a mobile terminal such as a mobile phone, the mobile phone needs to look for a network to obtain the network ID of the PLMN.
However, in the existing technology, when searching a network, the mobile phone needs to keep searching and attempts to connect to a searched network. The mobile phone cannot make network access until a network type supported by the mobile phone is found after continuous attempt, it takes a long time to connect to a network; a continuous network connection attempt of the mobile phone can result in large power consumption and poor user communication experience.